Summer Skin: How to Get It and Why It’s Important!
June 21, 2012 7:08 pm
Your skin needs extra help staying hydrated during the summer months. Exposure to hot outdoor weather followed by cold and dry indoor air can easily pull moisture from your skin and I see dry, red, and chapped skin in so many of my clients during the summer.
Here are three simple steps you can take to prevent or treat dry the summer skin:
1. Cleansing: The big point here is using a mild, cream based soap and using it sparingly in the summer time. Harsh soaps can easily strip the natural oils from the outer protective layer of your skin causing your it to become even more sensitive. At 360 Skin we carry a great product by Image called Vital C Hydrating Repair Creme, perfect for cleaning & hydrating the skin. Use once, maybe twice a day if you’re oily, don’t overscrub or feel as though you need to exfoliate with it. Simple, soft strokes, and you’re good to go. Make sure to rinse well and pat dry.
2. Moisturizing: This is an essential step to perform in the summer. Your skin can’t compete with the climate. Even if you follow my cleansing recommendations, you will still strip away some of those precious natural skin oils.
In order to choose a good moisturizer, it’s helpful to understand how moisturizers work. Moisturizers add oil to the skin, trap water, and smooth/polish the skin in a way that improves barrier function, making skin likely to dry out or become irritated.
There are two important points to moisturizing: timing and product quality. With timing, moisturizers applied after bathing capture the water that has soaked into your skin, so apply them within three minutes after stepping out of the bath or shower.
And now product quality: The important ingredients in moisturizers are: the oils, the water binders and the barrier enhancers. Oils: The best moisturizers are going to have natural oil ingredients such as shea butter, grape seed oil, and other food based oils and less “filler” such as petroleum jelly.
Water binding ingredients include glycerin, hyaluronic acid and alpha hydroxy acids (AHA’s) such as lactic and glycolic acids. AHA’s enhance the barrier strength of the skin by compacting and tightening the outer layer of the skin giving the skin a smooth and polished look.
At 360 Skin, we carry the best moisturizer I’ve ever touched, Image’s Max Cream. It’s pumped full of plant derived stem cells (great for hydration and prevention of free radicals), polypeptides (again more hydration and excellent for reversing aging). This cream actively repairs cell damage, protects against free radical damage, and recreates the extracellular matrix to maintain a healthy structure of the skin.
3. Environmental Protection: Protecting your summertime skin from sun light, harsh climates and chemicals is very important. So the basics here are: wear sunscreen every day!
Ultra-violet A rays (UVA) are especially intense during the summer and they can permanently damage your skin. UVA is what I call the “wrinkle ray”. It penetrates the skin more deeply than the “sunburn ray” Ultra-Violet B (UVB), and that’s how wrinkles happen.
To keep UVA from penetrating, apply a broad spectrum sunscreen all year round. In my opinion, a sunscreen with titanium and zinc oxide is the best broad spectrum sun protection ingredient available. Image has a great one we carry here called Daily Defense SPF 35. It is a great sunscreen plus it has a moisturizer component so you kill two birds with one stone.
Lastly, drink lots of water! With carefully selected skin care products, used consistently throughout the summer, healthy, soft, hydrated skin is not just a hope it’s a guarantee.